This Post is one in a Series on American Climate Politics by
Guest Blogger Craig K. Comstock. This Post explores similarities
between the chronic politics of greenhouse gases and the current
politics of poison gas in Syria. This essay first appeared at The
Huffington Post on 3 September 2013. Comstock says of this Series
for Caixin:

"Even more than economic growth, climate change is the defining
issue of our century, yet the American political system has so far
addressed it only timidly and obliquely. One question is why.
Another question is how the system can be prodded to deal with a
threat whose cause is invisible (greenhouse gases), and comes as a
"side effect" of benefits from burning fossil fuels.”

What's a President to do when confronted with killer gas? But
let's say that the gas in question threatens the President's own
country and that Tomahawk missiles are utterly irrelevant. I refer
not to poison gas released in a Damascus suburb, but to greenhouse
gases being emitted, as a "side effect," by the worldwide
combustion of fossil fuels in power plants, furnaces, vehicles, and
factories.

What I offer here is not another sermon about the need to do
something about climate change, but a brief analysis of why it's so
hard to make the necessary transition, in the context of the
current excitement about punishing a foreign leader with strikes as
photogenic as a video game.

Without an independent inquiry, we don't know for sure who
released the poison gas. We also don't know today what would be the
net effect of militarily attacking the Assad regime or how great
the "collateral damage" of a Tomahawk attack would be. But we do
know that, according to peer-reviewed science, the result of
releasing greenhouse gases will eventually be widespread, costly,
and deadly, here in North America and around the planet.

Dealing with the causes of climate change is the dominant
challenge for serious leaders, whatever may be our correct
response, if any, to poison gas in Damascus.

A deliberate release of poison gas is meant to harm. In
contrast, greenhouse gases have become known as an unfortunate,
invisible side-effect of activities that have benefitted us. The
big problem is that greenhouse gases come, in part, from the use of
energy that has built our civilization and on which we currently
rely. The harm caused by these gases occurs not in minutes, as in
the case of sarin gas, but accumulates slowly, over decades; is not
restricted to a single locale but affects the entire planet.

In The Burning Question, Mike Berners-Lee and his co-author
Duncan Clark say memorably, "If you wanted to invent a problem to
induce confusion, disbelief and the turning of blind eyes, it would
be hard to come up with something better than climate change. It's
caused by a build-up of gases that we can't see, smell or taste and
the effects play out through a weather and climatic system that is
by its nature unpredictable and variable."

Though the economics of sustainable power are becoming more
favorable, we so far lack the enormous infrastructure that would
reduce our use of power (like insulation) and the infrastructure
that would generate our needs sustainably (like solar panels and
wind turbines).

Most of all, the "reserves" of fossil fuel still in the ground
(deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas) would become less valuable
the more competitive that sustainable energy becomes, and the more
stringent governments are about imposing on fossil fuels their true
costs. The current price of stock in fossil fuel firms clearly
reflects a judgment by investors that sales will not slow, much
less decline rapidly. Are we going to let this judgment stand?

It's much easier to kill people with missiles in a foreign
country than to undertake any transition in the U.S. economy from
fossil fuels to sustainable energy. The President simply gives an
order that is sent down the chain of command. The most profound
dysfunction of the U.S. government has to do less with the military
and "security" budgets, our system of health care, the debt
ceiling, or the rate of economic growth, than with the failure to
deal effectively with climate change caused by greenhouse gases. If
nothing sufficient is done, the effects will become obvious only
when it would be too late.

One path is business as usual: these companies and their allies
continue bankrolling doubt about the need to change and the
campaigns and careers of allies in government, our political class
goes on protecting this industry, even as it endangers all of us,
and as effects get really bad humanity is reduced to desperate acts
of geo-engineering.

Another path is economic transformation: we make the necessary
changes, even in a culture distracted by questions such as, "Should
we attack Syria?" We notice the red line we are taking part in
crossing, the red line of perilous greenhouse gas concentrations. A
movement led by the richest countries does what is necessary to
persuade the countries increasing their emissions the fastest.

With most Republicans reflexively opposing anything that Obama
proposes, except perhaps the use of "kinetic" force, what would be
the political cost of educating the public about what it will take
not to become hopeless victims of climate change? Anyone in a
position of power who ignores the challenge of climate change, in
his actions, will eventually be excoriated, and will have a legacy
of profound failure. Anyone who even begins to meet this challenge
will be celebrated.

"Craig K. Comstock studied political science at MIT and
Stanford, but makes his living as a coach to authors of books and,
for a while, as director of the Ark Foundation. Author of several
books, he also writes extensively on the internet and hosts a TV
interview show."

Winckler is selecting these Posts on American Climate Politics
from among Comstock's many essays at the online Huffington Post.
Insightfully, Comstock often notes analogies between the politics
of climate and the politics of other global crises, present and
past.

总访问量：博主简介

韦爱德Edwin A. Winckler (韦爱德) is an American political scientist (Harvard BA, MA, and PhD) who has taught mostly in the sociology departments at Columbia and Harvard. He has been researching China for a half century, publishing books about Taiwan’s political economy (Sharpe, 1988), China’s post-Mao reforms (Rienner, 1999), and China’s population policy (Stanford, 2005, with Susan Greenhalgh). Recently he has begun also explaining American politics to Chinese. So the purpose of this Blog is to call attention to the best American media commentary on current American politics and to relate that to the best recent American academic scholarship on American politics. Winckler’s long-term institutional base remains the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York City. However he and his research have now retreated to picturesque rural Central New York.